Thursday, May 31, 2018

Lurching into Summer

I'm glad I spent the past several weeks on yard work because the weather has turned cold and drizzly, perfect weather to get back to the loom.  These are the same turned taquete towels that I always weave, just in another set of colors.  That tall stack in the window sill are empty plastic cones.  I keep thinking they'd make a great craft project, maybe Christmas trees?
We babysat our "granddog" last weekend.  He's allowed on furniture at home so rather than try to keep him off, Ian covered everything with quilts.  We really enjoyed having him here, the only exception was the cat.  There were no altercations but there were a few uneasy moments.
Rusty was over the moon with free access to our back yard.  He just has a dog run at home so asked to go out quite often.  He'd circle the yard sniffing and making peeing gestures throughout though I can't see how he could have that much pee!  I was out with him on Sunday when much to my delight, here's the Butterfly Weed that I thought wasn't going to come back.
I checked on it again today and am astonished to see this much growth in just four days.  There is a ton of work that goes with this yard but I've wanted something  like this all my life and am very gratified when my "babies" do well.
I've finally finished another two Campbell tartan scarves and hope to get Arthur warped on Monday for a couple more, but in different nontraditional colors.  Now I just need to get the sold scarf in the mail.
This is my current knitting project, all from handspun yarn.  I spun it so many years ago that I can't remember much about it, other than it's a hoggit fleece that I sent to MorroFleeceworks for processing.  The yoke is knit on a provisional cast-on, working upward to the finished neck.  Then for the body I picked up the live stitches from the provisional crochet chain, knit a couple of rows, put the sleeve stitches on holders and knit down and finished with 3" of ribbing.  I've done all of that and then I tried it on.  It'a a body suit!  Oh my goodness, how I wish I counted the stitches before I started knitting.  I tore back to a couple inches below the armhole and am adding increases every inch. I pretty sure it's going to be okay.
I'm far more concerned about my yarn situation.  I found a pound of spun skeins in two separate locations.  One bag had a note that the yarn wasn't fulled - good to know.  I was well into the body when I had the dreadful realization that half of the yarn is two-ply and half is three-ply.  Again, it's been to long ago for me to remember even spinning it! I spun and triple-plied the six ounces but didn't check it against the old yarn and it's a little thicker.  Again, I think it'll be okay, but it's where to join the two-ply where the change will be the least obvious.  I did the 3" of ribbing in two-ply and think if I knit the top of the sleeves in three-ply, I can switch at about the elbows.  The color is the same of course, it's just that light is refracted differently on a three-ply compared to a two-ply yarn.  I'm pretty sure this has to be a unique blooper, a brand new mistake, not that I'm proud of it.  For now, I'm going to just keep knitting.

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